YouTube Launching Its Own Food Channel: "The Cooking Show on Television Is Almost Dead"

I was excited enough when YouTube announced it was launching "Geek and Sundry" in April, a new channel devoted to all things geek and featuring shows by such geek icons as Felicia Day. But then the video Web site had to go and up the ante.

Today, YouTube announced that it will be launching another in its series of specialized channels this July: a food channel called HUNGRY (all caps, of course) that will feature "a freewheeling blend of how-to and celebrity-driven food videos," according to USA Today.

Shows planned for HUNGRY will initially be "YouTube length," running one to three minutes. But there's no limit to how long or offbeat the shows will ultimately be.

One of those shows will feature Duff Goldman, whose previous show -- Ace of Cakes -- ran on the Food Network, and who has plans to make his show more interactive and instructive than what's currently airing on his old channel.

"Basically, the cooking show on television is almost dead," Goldman told USA Today. "When you look at the programming on any kind of cable food channel, you kind of find that everything is being replaced by travelogues, competition, reality. There is not a lot of instruction."

The Austin-based "Casserole Queens" will also have a show of their own.

Other shows planned for the launch this July include Brothers Green, tracking a pair of Brooklyn-based musicians and "underground caterers" who are also brothers, and the Texas-based Casserole Queens.

The Queens themselves, Crystal Cook and Sandy Pollock, will likely be familiar to many Texans for both their New York Times best-seller cookbook -- The Casserole Queens Cookbook -- and their retro antics. The pair is famous for delivering their homemade casseroles throughout Austin in full June Cleaver gear, complete with aprons, high heels and pearls.